Here’s another lost PVTA bus! The R14E was a rush hour-only (mostly) express route from Springfield to, as the name suggests, the Agawam Industrial Park. It’s gone now, but I rode it over the summer before it was cut, so we can see what it was like.
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| The bus at Union Station. |
From Springfield Union Station, we headed down Dwight Street, which was generally urban, with buildings and parking lots. Next, we turned onto Harrison Ave, going through the heart of downtown Springfield and over the Memorial Bridge into West Springfield. We went around a rotary and merged onto Route 5, beginning the express portion that gave this route its “E” designation.
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| Crossing the Connecticut River. |
The highway was mostly woods, and we moved quickly down it. We went over the Westfield River, and soon after that, we reached another rotary and merged onto Route 57. This highway allowed for some views of the surrounding buildings, mostly houses, but we soon left it on the Main Street exit. After some suburban businesses with parking lots, we deviated into the Heritage Nursing Home facility – one of this route’s functions was transporting its workers.
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| A building within the complex. |
We now went south down Main Street, which was mostly houses with a good smattering of businesses as well. We also went by a school and a few churches. Next, we turned onto the residential Elm Street, which became Silver Street. There was a shopping plaza and some other suburban businesses at the intersection with Suffield Street, though.
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| “Guns and Gear, LLC.” |
It started to get a little industrial from there, with a few stretches of houses here and there. Once we made our way onto Bowles Road, though, it was all industrial. We just passed lots of random weird corporate buildings and offices before just kinda turning around and laying over at the end of the street. Sure!
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| What a weird place to end! |
PVTA Route: R14E (Springfield/Agawam Industrial Park)
Ridership: I wish I could find ridership numbers online for this one, but I can’t. I took the last trip at 6:30, and it only got about three riders – I really want to know if the other ones got more people.
Pros: This was a fast, convenient way of getting to the Agawam Industrial Park and the Heritage Nursing Home – the express portion was awesome.
Cons: The times for the route were really weird: 6:35, 1:30, 3:00, and 6:30. I mean, maybe those had something to do with the hours of the industrial buildings, but they seem to miss out the evening rush entirely!
Nearby and Noteworthy: Lots of industrial buildings, I guess, if that’s your cup of tea.
Final Verdict: 6/10
I dunno, I’m kinda ambiguous about this one. It was fine, I guess, but the schedule times and ridership numbers were questionable. Still, it was a lot better than what the route is like now – now they stick this thing along the regular R14, with trips at 6:15, 2:15, 3:15, and 4:15. What’s the point of running it with the local route, though? All it does is take ridership away from the normal R14 trips. It really isn’t helping anyone to run the route this way, and it takes much longer. Whereas the express trips could go out to Agawam and back in 55 minutes, the new local trips take 63, making it harder to interline or do another trip. Yeah, it’s kind of a mess now…
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Agawam bus service is so anemic as it is. There’s a huge part of town that has no bus service at all! I’m especially surprised that there is no bus route along Main St to serve the MA Veterans’ Cemetery and Six Flags.
I totally agree with you there needs to be more buses coming to Agawam especially in the morning between 6:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. because all the businesses have people coming to work between those hours and leaving between 3:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. you get a lot more Riders if you had more time like that for the work people
Years ago, it was just twice per day. 6:30 am and 3: 05 PM (for the industrial park. HeritaGE was also served by the mainline route at 6:30 AM and 3:15 PM, then a trip at 1:30 was added). Those trips were also local, that worked for those employees who wanted to get off at the shopping plazas to run errands on their way home. (Some riders complained about the express variant because of that)
Then for a couple of years around 1999 there was an R26 that went to Riverside Park (now Six Flags) daily (except Sundays–this was when Springfield PVTA never ran on Sundays). The old 705 route also went to Riverside (3x Saturdays ONLY, prior to 1998). There is a proposal I saw a year ago to bring back some service to Six Flags. On Saturdays there was a 6:30 am Heritage ONLY run. Also, they tried the R14 to serve Suffield Street briefly, with a much longer route and enhanced frequency.
My own recommendations would be to return the R14 mainline to :30 past the hour weekdays and Saturdays. first run at 5:30 AM (6:30 on Saturdays), last run at 7 PM (as it now is), add a 5:30 PM on Sundays, maybe interline weekend runs with the B17 (the B17 should run on Sundays ANYWAY), extend the whole R14 to Pheasant Hills on Sundays, make the Country View apartments demand only, weekday frequency would change to 45 minutes (Weekdays & Saturdays, also better than the weird thing they got now).
restore Saturday Heritage service (use the mainline on Saturdays only). The industrial park could extend at least to Pheasant Hills (which is only like 3 minutes from there anyway, adding more options, possibly more riders) (better yet, extend it to Southwick to serve those who live there but work at the industrial park, as well as serving an office park out there by Powder Mill School… I used to get around a lot even beyond the PVTA realm when I lived there LOL–if they were to extend it to Southwick I would probably run that as an express)
Finally microtransit was also proposed for Agawam, which would meet the same service span as the regular bus, but unlike what I saw proposed, I would continue the current industrial park service using the regular bus, no transfers to microtransit required (because who in their right mind wants to add extra transfers to their trips)